The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July

bl8n8r writes "In July of 1982, an infected Apple II propogated the first computer virus onto a 5-1/4" floppy. The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner, was authored in Pittsburgh by a 15-year-old high school student, Rich Skrenta. The virus replicated by monitoring floppy disk activity and writing itself to the floppy when it was accessed. Skrenta describes the virus as "It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack." Remember, he was a 9th grader when he did this."

Re:1988 Morris internet worm

[Anonymous Coward]

That was not a virus. It was a worm. There is (used to be?) a difference.

Um no. it wasn't

[Lumpy]

1981 - Apple Viruses 1, 2, and 3 are some of the first viruses "in the wild," or in the public domain. Found on the Apple II operating system, the viruses spread through Texas A&M via pirated computer games.

Answering my own question, sort of

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Of the "ten most destructive PC viruses of all time [techweb.com]":

CIH, by Chen Ing Hau, who "attended a university" at the time of release ~1998.
Melissa virus, by David L. Smith, age 31 in 1999
ILOVEYOU, by university student for thesis, 2000
Code Red, author unknown?
SQL Slammer, 2003, by a 21-22 year old
Blaster, 2003, variant by an 18 year old
Sobig, possibly by 30 year old Ruslan Ibragimov?
Bagle, author unknown?
MyDoom, unknown
Sasser, by 17 year old

Not much to go on.

Earlier not-in-wild viruses

[Wikipedia]

to quote: http://vx.netlux.org/lib/aes03.html [netlux.org]

Dr. Cohen defined the term to mean a security problem that attaches itself to other code and turns it into something that produces viruses; to quote from his paper: "We define a computer `virus' as a program that can infect other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself." He claimed the first computer virus was "born" on November 3, 1983, written by himself for a security seminar course. (That the Internet Worm was unleased on the eve of the 5th anniversary of this event was coincidence of a most amazing sort.) Actual computer viruses were being written by individuals before Cohen, although not named such, as early as 1980 on Apple II computers.[9] The first few viruses were not circulated outside of a small population, with the notable exception of the "Elk Cloner" virus for Apple II computers, released in 1981.

Also Don't Forget the Dark Avenger

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dark Avenger Virus was the first to use a polymorphic encryption engine, in order to change it's "signature" at runtime.

It also pioneered the use of the "delta offset" - a clever assembly language trick that allowed for the body of the virus to be relocatable to any segment in memory, without hardcoding.

Perhaps most importantly, the commented source code for this virus was spread far and wide and inspired the creation of many virus groups such as Falcon/Skism and Nuke.

still infecting...in emulators

[joshuac]

Not enough time right now to go into depth, but I sorting through a collection of 5.25" Apple images, I saw this message popup on one of the emulators "bootup". Had no idea what it was and didn't bother looking too far in depth into it. This was back in 2006, when I was organizing my collection of stuff I had written as a kid, random public domain disks I had copies, of, random things I had made copies of as a kid from my gradeschool computer lab, etc...in the process, plenty of "catalog" commands ran (this is how it spreads, he has the 6502 source http://www.skrenta.com/cloner/clone-src.txt [skrenta.com] on his website and a few more items about it there), plenty of disks "swapped" out of virtual floppy drives, so I'm sure the infection is well spread.

Maybe I'll keep it around as a living pet in my emulator :)

Re:Imagine his wealth...

[Jansingal]

Why does this article not mention Fred Cohen, who found the first virus?

Re:Has this been done before?

[Phroggy]

So how do you screencap a BSOD?

Using an emulator, such as VirtualPC.